MK: To what extent do you think that an American Empire exists today?

EH: It’s certainly a real Empire. It’s not an Empire in which you have formal empire but it’s an empire in which you have client states and de facto control – or at least substantial influence – and in which you have directed countries to move in certain directions. The whole plan on the Iraq invasion was to conquer and then allow “democracy” meaning have a controlled state – a state in which you have somebody ruling like Allawi – who was essentially a US puppet or at least to accept all the premises of the global economic system and US requirements. The US was planning to have 14 key bases and they were assuming that whatever “democratic” existed would allow 14 bases in their country. The whole thing is kind of mind boggling but it shows the underlying assumption that they were going to shape the nature of the politics and the political economy and they have done a lot in that direction although they are having real problem. So it is an empire that’s not like the old system of having formal colonies. It’s a neo-imperialist system in which you don’t have colonies but you have client states that are tied to you in very detailed ways – with military interchanges and connections to the military establishment and you have compelled an integration into the international economy; you’ve have loans made that have tied in with the IMF or World Bank. So they are tied into a system of loose dependency. This is the way that the US did it in Latin America during the Cold War.

In Latin America the US has really supported a whole system of essentially national security states. We didn’t have colonies – Brazil was not a colony but after the Brazilian coup in 1964 – it was a very important event which was helped along – sponsored by – the US, put in power a collection of generals many of whom had trained in the schools of the Americas and considered the US to be their parent and godfather. They even outlawed criticism of the US in the early years after the coup and they were very responsive to the godfather – the godfather had tremendous influence. That’s the nature of the colonialization although there were some that were even more closely controlled. But the essence of the US system is that you establish client states where the politicians will be responsive and you have a military establishment – that’s the other important feature of the US national security states. The US after WW2 began to train police and military personal and build relationships with them to make them a subversive force and an enforcer in all these countries. They trained them to be hostile to populism and threats from below so the military in these Latin American states were basically subversive agents of the US. For a long time they ruled but they made such a mess that they turned it back to civilian rule but the civilian rule operated under conditions that 1. There was heavy debt to the West – they were now in the global economic system (a significant control 2. They had all kind of relationships with the US 3. And you had the military establishment still sitting there as the dictas of disciplinary force – they could be called in to actions at any time. So these civilian government in Latin America after the lapse of the military were all extremely constrained and they were either open clients or groups that were very constrained by this package of international finance, borrowing, military people in the background.

MK: But have we seen a change since the collapse of the Soviet Union? What you talk about was in the context of the Cold War. Is the “war on terror” and American violence throughout the 1990s a different mode of operation?

EH: It’s gotten more aggressive. The old theory in the US, and probably in England to was that we were “containing” the Soviet Union. That was a sick joke – that was straight Orwell. In fact, the Soviet Union was containing us – we had been the expansionary force. The Soviet Union was actually a defensive and quite weak regional power. From the time of Stalin onwards they didn’t do any expanding at all. The US did the expanding and they were constrained by the fact that the Soviet Union did align in its opportunistic way with a lot of these third world countries provided some kind of defense to them. And that defense was eliminated with the death of the Soviet Union. Real “containment” – as opposed to the phony containment we were engaging with – died. So the US has been freer to operate I the world. The big problem has been: what excuse do you use now? They used the Cold War – the Soviet threat is the excuse. They needed new excuses. They’ve had serial excuses: “Drug war”….

MK: The “war on terrorism” now…

EH: The “war on terrorism”. A war on a proper noun. Terrorism is actually a mode of fighting and in fact the US and its allies use terrorism as a mode of fighting to a far greater extent than the “terrorists”.

MK: Every superpower in the history has tried to dominate lesser powers. Why should we expect it to ever be different?

EH: I don’t think we should expect it to be different but it’s repulsive. And therefore what is incumbent on every decent citizen in the US is to try to reduce the power believe it or not. The fact that we have built up this immense armament that has nothing to do with national security – it has only to do with projecting power abroad and beating up other people – I think its incumbent on the movements in the US to focus attention on scaling down this monstrosity because it’s a self-fulfilling system. One of my favourite is this monstrous Madeleine Albright. In Colin Powell’s autobiography he mentions that when they were considering policy towards Kosovo she said, “Well what’s the point of having this huge army, this wonderful military, if we don’t use it?” So if you have the military apparatus, if you can beat everybody else up – there’s a very strong inclination to beat everyone else up and to use it to your advantage. So it’s absolutely a monstrosity that this country keeps beating up its weaponry and its advantage which it will then use. The US needs to be constrained but its citizenry has to do some of that to but they’re not even aware of it.

MK: I wanted to move onto the specifics how America dominates the world in terms of economic imperialism. You wrote in your essay “The Global Empire”, “Global aid has long been deployed to supplement private trade and financing.” Now that’s not what we’re told by the leaders of the US and England – we’re told this is altruism, it’s done for the benefit of the people that receive the aid. Even the IMF and the World Bank we’re told were created after the Second World War to help countries in economic straits. What function do the World Bank and the IMF perform in reality and who’s interest do they represent?

EH: At the end of the Second World War their function was to help stabilize to help development. At that moment in history there was a slightly idealistic thread but this eventually was turned into something quite different. The dominant powers used these institutions to serve their own interests – the IMF and the World Bank were using their leverage to force third world countries to do things that would be serviceable to the great powers.

MK: When did that change start to happen?

EH: It evolved slowly but it accelerated in the 1980s – 1979, 1980 onwards. Instead of allowing these countries to develop according to their own choices and possibly to put their focus on helping people within their country with their basic needs, these pretended it was in everybody’s interest to be part of the global market – to orient yourself to integration into the global market. To privatize in other words – the neoliberal formulas were imposed. But these neoliberal formulas were really not in the interests of the majority of people in the third world, they were in the interests of the transnational corporations because they facilitated acquisition of property in third world countries, penetration.

MK: How do the Bretton Woods institutions run? Are they run on a democratic basis?

EH: They are run on a democratic basis in the sense that the money that is put in is what determines who can vote. The votes are in proportion to your contributions to these funds, the US has the largest portion and its also uses it muscle pretty aggressively. So to a large extent dominated these funds and whenever it doesn’t want to lend to Nicaragua and the Sandinistas, the IMF and World Bank genuflect so the US can decide who will get the money and who will definitely not get the money – by itself they can make that decision.

MK: Do you think the UN, which has also got the veneer of a multilateral institution, is the same thing? Is it just an instrument of US power?

EH: It’s not totally but it’s close to it. So if you look at how the US has performed in the last twenty years when the US wants something done – when it says that human rights are important like in Darfur and Bosnia the UN runs and jumps. But when it’s not very interested at all or if it’s supporting the villains, as with the Israeli’s in the Occupied Territories the UN is essentially powerless. The UN can vote, for example, on Israel but the US always vetoes anything hostile – it can be almost droll in that the US was very tough on alleged ethnic cleansing in Kosovo – they weren’t even satisfied with monitors but with Israel the world community has said, “Let’s have monitors in the Occupied Territories”. These are Occupied Territories whereas Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia but the double standard is absolutely staggering. Monitors aren’t even enough in Kosovo which is a province, but in the Occupied Territories which is really under UN jurisdiction the US refuses even to allow monitors and they get away with it.

MK: You’ve gone over how the US dominates the political institutions like the UN but going back to the IMF and the World Bank, “structural adjustment” are often talked about as economic imperialism. How do they work? Under what conditions are they enforced and how do they siphon off money from third world countries to the richer ones?

EH: They are essentially economic requirements imposed on third world countries when they get into serious debt problem. In the early 1980s there was a recession that was imposed really on the world by the Reagan administration which carried out a very deflationary policy in 1980/81 and that put huge pressure on third world countries that had debts. With deflation they had trouble meeting them. They then fell into default and that meant they came under IMF control: they were in default on loans from the loans so the IMF could impose conditions on them – “we won’t make any more loans unless they carry out certain programs.” And these “structural adjustment programs” they carried out were programs that were precisely attuned to what the transnational corporations wanted in these third world countries – they would have to privatize, they would have to cut back on public expenditures for things that would help ordinary citizens, they would have to orientate their whole program to paying their debt and helping out transnational corporations enter the country. So it was really quite a blatant set of conditions serviceable only to the external power and foreign interests and really quite damaging to ordinary citizens. The World Bank and IMF have for some years now claimed “We realize that poverty hasn’t been alleviated in the third world and we can’t understand it,” when in fact their whole programs are structured to increase poverty because they force cutbacks on welfare programs, they force deflationary policies, privatization – all things which will be serviceable to the big boys and will be damaging to the little people in the countries involved. So the bias is staggering.

MK: But opening up their markets to foreign direct investment (FDI) has often had positive affects. If you look at the example of South Korea and North Korea – North Korea has practiced pretty much autarky – it doesn’t really trade with the outside world whereas South Korea does and the difference in affluence it pretty marked. And the same is true of China, when it opened up it’s…

EH: China did extremely well as an autonomous economy under Mao Tse-Tung and so in fact the comparison that was made by Seine on between China and India was that India did much more poorly under its relatively free enterprise system than China did under Mao Tse-Tung’s socialist system. It’s true that China has boomed under their new market system but I think that is going to be a catastrophe in the long run – the environmental problems are absolutely acute and they’ve created inequality within China that is absolutely staggering. What they have done is create Dickensian conditions in the cities and the East to service the transnational corporations. So you get incredibly poor people – the wages are at the lowest in the world in China – but meanwhile you’ve got a few million people making mad amounts of money. But I think it’s an extremely ugly society and it’s heading for total disaster so I don’t think China is a model in any way at all. Its growth has been high but its environmental problems are tremendous, its inequality is staggering and you have mass, mass poverty. Also, the whole welfare system has declines so that the rural masses are in worse shape than they were under Mao – it’s a terrible scene.

If you compare South Korea and North Korea, it’s true that South Korea has done remarkably well and North Korea has not. But North Korea is a strange, weird autocracy and South Korea is an anomaly – it doesn’t fit the usual model – it’s not a pure free-market economy at all – it’s a highly controlled economy with the government giving an awful lot of direction. Its success was due that in good part to the fact it wasn’t following the structural adjustment rules. The same is true of all those countries like Taiwain – Taiwain was another controlled economy, it didn’t move toward radical free enterprise system according to structural adjustment rules. It’s fairly complicated but I think it would be a big mistake to think that these structural adjustment rules are helpful.

MK: But in principal, the so-called “Washington Consensus” is based on free-trade, the liberalization of borders. In the propaganda of the people who conceived it, it was supposed to give an “equal playing field” for all the different countries in the world. You’ve written that the “Great Powers manipulate the trade environment”. How do they manipulate the trade environment and what affect does it have on the weaker powers?

EH: The Washington consensus is really a consensus that removes the freedom to choose for third world countries. They cannot choose a development model that puts emphasis on the basic needs of the population. It also ignores the fact that there are public service functions and public expenditures that can be very good in the long run. It ignores the fact that infant industries may need protection to be able to compete with the big boys in the long run. Autonomy – that little distance from the Great Powers – the sharks that can come in and take over your country could be very useful for maintaining independent, for having autonomous development, for being able to meet the needs of your population and giving them heavy weight as opposed to just the global corporations. The Washington Consensus is an agreement that structural adjustment programs are desirable for all these countries – make them “more like the Western countries”. But it doesn’t make them that much more like, it makes them more into dependencies and incapable of independent growth and also it basically prevents them from taking an independent growth path – that’s very important. If you get into the Washington Consensus, the country loses its autonomy – it loses its capacity to decide, “I wish to serve my people; I wish to make sure everybody is not hungry; that we have a good public education system” – they can’t decide that if they follow the Washington Consensus.

MK: So it’s just a form of economic imperialism dressed up in altruistic rhetoric…

EH: That’s right. It’s economic imperialism that is being enforced through institutions in which the imperial countries dominate and set the tone and stage.

MK: You can mitigate the different affects but at the end of the day this is a trend in human affairs, how do you fight it? There are little victories here and there, but it seems like the logic will just reach its conclusion. More and more is getting privatizing now… Is it just going to continue until something else takes its place?

EH: We’re in a period of progressive loss – progressives have been losing steadily and the horrible fact we have consider – I’m basically a pessimist and to me each loss makes for further loss. The more power you loss, the more the enemy is strong and can enforce his will further. So the more you privatize and the weaker governments are, the more you’re integrated into the international economy, the less movement possibilities you have. Someone like Lula in Brazil is having a terrible time escaping from this Washington Consensus because each one of these reformers and progressives that wins an election battle as they come into power they are confronted with the fact that there’s a threat that they won’t be able to borrow money, that they’re heavy loans, that the international market may decide they are intolerable and withdraw funds and refuse to lend to them. So even before they’re in power, they’re assuring the market that they’re going to follow certain rules and most of them sell-out even before they get into power.

It’s almost an absolute rule – social democratic sell-outs: either right before they take power, or right after they take power because the system has become so powerful, the constraints on the democratic leaders are so powerful that they really have a very limited range of choice, they have to work within very narrow bounds.

MK: So the mainstream politics parties in most third world countries can’t change the basic facts…

EH: It’s very difficult. Recent elections have been very depressing in that respect, partly because this system is a beautiful integrated whole. The corporate community has the money and power and it has extended itself globally, the money market is now global and labour has been weakened by globalisation and by technological and other factors, so the countervailing powers in this society have been weakened that would curb business power both in the political and economic sphere. It’s power increases so it can write new laws, weaken labour further, and weaken the environmental conditions and control the media more closely and get rid of public service media. So the system has self-reinforcing quality that is really quite frightening. It’s easy to say “We need more grassroots organizations, we need progressive think tanks” but where are they going to get the money. We need stronger trade unions, we need countervailing forces, we need the worlds labour and progressives to communicate with each other, we need to use the internet more – this is all true but its all growing in a strong wind because the wind that is changing is the wind that is unfavorable.

MK: Is it a specifically American imperialism or do the IMF and World Bank support the whole of the West?

EH: Well America is the heart of the matter, but the others are also participants and the IMF and World Bank are the vehicles of the Great Powers of which the US is number one so to a large extent its been a vehicle of the US.

MK: But there is such minimal opposition from the citizenry of the US to this type of imperialism. Is that because people don’t know about it, or has it been “normalized” for the population?

EH: It’s both. They don’t know about it, and also they’re convinced that the enemy is evil – the system is a powerful manipulative system so that every time we get into a struggle with somebody we want to overthrow – the government and the media start to demonize, they make the populations of these demonized countries guilty too – they’re willing executioners.

They give filtered information – they just don’t tell the public, the public is just given symbols and images that will serve the cause. So something like Kosovo – there is endless streams of pictures of Albanian refugees – they could have actually had Serb refugees, there were thousands of Serb refugees. Of course, after NATO took over there was the greatest ethnic cleansing in the Balkans history under NATO – in terms of the proportion of people that were exported, but it didn’t agitate the American people – they didn’t know it, they didn’t even know what happened.

When there’s a target like Milosevic, the media are rushing over there looking for villains and victims. A lot of them really did suffer in that civil war. The capacity of the media in working in a symbiotic relationship with the government to create images and make people either sympathetic with whatever actions the government wants to take or apathetic and paralysed because things are so complex. The power there is absolutely enormous – becoming more and more convincing. The government can do practically anything. The Falluja thing is absolutely amazing. The US forces go into Falluja, they destroy a clinic by bombs and they occupy the general hospital and tie up the doctors and some of the patients and they do this on the grounds that this is a source of propaganda? Propaganda meaning that they will actually disseminate information that civilians are being hurt in Falluja and the media looks at this briefly but they don’t have the slightest criticism of this, which is an absolutely gross violation of international law. If Milosevic had done that, or Saddam Hussein, the media would have shown great indignation at this violation of international law. It’s incredible.

MK: If we accept that the US population eats up this propaganda, then the likely opposition to the American Empire is not likely to come from the internal citizenry organizing…

EH: It could only if the Empire backfires – that is if the cost gets very heavy and some people think it might.

MK: The most likely form is that there will be some sort of economic backlash – imperial overstretch. Can you see that happening?

EH: There are other options too. The capacity of the system to create whipping boys and villains is absolutely fantastic so it may be that they’ll blame the whole thing on gay marriages. Gay marriage – it’s this immorality! God is hitting the American people because they are allowing gays to actually dominate the theatre and media.

MK: It’s true!

EH: It’s the immorality that is causing us to suffer, not the fact that we’re spending 400 billion dollars killing people.

MK: You’ve written that the “global imperial order, led by the US, has been weakened somewhat by the economic disabilities of the US and the rise in the economic strengths of Japan and Germany.” So the real rival to American power is not going to come from popular movements, surely it will come from the economic development of other powers and the eventual decline of the US.

EH: But it hasn’t showed a hell of a lot of willingness to decline. Since I wrote that, things have perked up a bit for the US economically.

MK: It’s still a young Empire, isn’t it?

EH: It is still a young Empire, but it is running up a pretty big debt and it is possible that there could be a loss of faith in the American dollar and a run on the dollar – that would hurt the economy badly and the conservatives might get a little bit upset over the deficit and the incredible waste of money that has gone on.

MK: They reckon the deficit will be 475 billion in three years.

EH: It depends on how you calculate it. Actually, what this miserable government does is not count the fact that they’re borrowing a couple hundred billion from the social security fund, which is doing pretty well. So the deficit instead of 475 billion is something closer to 675 billion.

MK: So it seems the people who have to pay for the Empire and these imperial wars are the people who don’t benefit from it. It’s the workers who are subsiding these adventures. If social security is being taken away, then it’s the poor who are having to pay. Is that a general pattern of imperialism?

EH: Yes, that’s how imperialism always works. You have a little concentrated group who benefit and then you have a mass that have to be manipulated into either accepting that we’re doing noble things or defending our national security or else our problems are caused by “niggas” or “gays” or “liberals” or “women”.

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